One of Putin’s instructors criticized Putin for his “lowered sense of danger”—a serious flaw for a potential spy.
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, Masha Gessen (UK) (US)
Also from that book, which I read in 2017:
Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it.
First, I dearly love the poster, which I presume is Polish, because Polish film poster art is always the best:
Stanislaw Lem’s PILOT PIRX stories are always considered to be on the softer end of his output — less philosophically knotty, less difficult. People take that to mean that the Pirx stuff is confectionery. That doesn’t mean they’re not interesting stories.
The setup is fairly standard. Top spacepilot Pirx is assigned a mission to lay probes in the Cassini Division, with a twist: some of his crew are androids, and he has to guess who is synthetic and who is human. If the android(s) evade detection and pass this fairly over-the-top Turing test, they get to go into mass production. The stress of this burden may prove too much for a new artificial mind with otherwise superhuman resources. Which leaves Pirx with the condundrum at the heart of the story: how can human weakness be used to thwart artificial superiority?
“Pirx is known for his unblemished honesty… as a human being, he does have some weaknesses.”
The androids herein are termed “anthropoid automations, so-called ‘finite non-linear.'” Pirx: “The pilot’s union will never allow it.” Space pilots union!
This is a Polish/Soviet co-production, and the biggest sign of that is the appearance of Alexander Kaidanovsky, star of Tarkovsky’s STALKER, released in the same year (1979). Also of note: Arvo Pärt scored a good deal of the film, which is kind of amazing, done in the year before Pärt left Soviet Estonia, where the Soviet end of things was sourced.
There’s an oddly Western feel to a lot of it: a Pam Am plane, people reading NEWSWEEK in English, mentions of the UN and UNESCO, Pirx in a denim leisure suit like Steve Austin, talk of Soviet-US cooperation, a Ballantine’s Scotch Whisky-branded ashtray. One imagines that, for at least some section of its original audience, that must have let some alien futurity leak into the setting.
Some of the camerawork has an unusual documentary feel to it, which compares interestingly with what must have been, for the place and period, an expensive production. It’s talky like British sf tv of the same period. There’s a lovely bit where a speech at the UN about the non-linears becomes one frame in a four-part screen showing the testing of crash dummies, all done in black and white.
The back half of the film is inside the spaceship, and it’s actually a marvel of solving design with little money. It’s utilitarian, clever with its use of space, drab in a way that mirrors ALIEN (which must have been in production at the same time) and well-directed. The ending, as convenient and telegraphed as it may appear, has a wonderful piece of imagery at its core, and the coda works to destabilise what came before. It’s a lot of fun, it looks and sounds great, and it’s thoughtful in that wonderful, lost 1970s way.
PILOT PIRX’S INQUEST (UK) (US)
One to bookmark for later: a primer on Southeast Asian speculative fiction.
Also from LitHub: On the New Golden Age Of African Fashion.
Another one to bookmark, because I like the title: Cosmic Ancestry: Afrobliss Inner Space Explorations.
In October, Fantagraphics Books are releasing a book of the cover art from Sun Ra’s label:
The creative solitude of Emily Dickinson: “Dickinson’s profound isolation granted her perspectives – ranging from the mystical to the ruminative to the critical – that daily social living might have cut off.”
I take Sundays off.
I can’t remember where I first came across the name of Georg Trakl, but apparently I was intrigued enough to order a collected edition of his poems, SURRENDER TO NIGHT, as translated and edited by Will Stone. Per Stone’s excellent introduction, it seems Trakl bumped into other people I’ve been interested in:
Trakl became acquainted with figures from the “Wiener Moderne” such as Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg und Oskar Kokoschka. Later Trakl would visit Kokoschka almost daily in his studio and there admired his 1913 painting Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Winds), a tortured vision of the relationship between the enigmatic Alma Mahler and the painter who idolized her.
A number of Trakl’s poems also appeared in the combative Expressionist art paper Der Ruf (The Cry) which championed, amongst others, Egon Schiele, whose brutally honest, risqué erotic drawings of prostitutes and models must surely have struck Trakl.
As I’ve noted before, I have no great feeling for poetry — and that’s a lack that I allowed to harden into a bias and a dogma over the years, so I’m trying to break it.
Trakl was not the most cheerful of people.
In August he made a rare trip with friends outside of his native land, to Venice. An extraordinary photograph shows Trakl, incongruous in a dark bathing suit, wandering the sands of the Lido. When asked of his opinions of the fabled city, he described Venice as “the gateway to hell”.
It’s not a book to read on a bad week, I’ll be honest. The arrangement of the poems shows a clear slide into chronic depression. You also begin to see repetition of phrases and images. At first, you think, oh, another shepherd, another bell, more fluttering, yellow hair, etc. But then you come to realise that he’s testing and refining his central imageries — trying them in slightly differing ways, again and again, trying to perfect them, trying to capture the true thing in all its thingness. There’s a lesson.
From black branches grief-stricken bells are sounding.
On your face the dew drips.
I find myself captivated by the imagery, and, contra the repetition, the range of imagery. From supernatural:
A fiery horseman gallops from the hill
And shatters in flames amongst the firs.
To full cosmic:
Others flee through darkening arcades;
And at night plunge from the red shuddering
Of stellar winds like raving maenads.
And this, which I keep coming back to:
Eve’s shadow comes, the hunt and red coins.
There is a striking moment in almost every one of these poems. “Spiders seek my heart.” “Footsteps in blood fog; black irons sound.” These are cast around like muddy gems among the emerging sense of rot, putrefaction, the stink of cadaverine that seems to fill his nostrils every time he sits down to write about the world he sees around him.
But. Right at the end of his life, there was:
…the striking message Trakl handed his publisher before boarding the train to Galicia. Ficker read: “Feelings in moments of death-like existence: all humans are worthy of love. Awakening you sense the world’s bitterness, in which resides all that unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement.”
Not long after, he wrote the poem “Grodek” on the back of his own will, while in hospital. Ficker had advised Trakl to contact Wittgenstein, who had previously supported Trakl financially, about his depression. By the time Wittgenstein got to the hospital, Trakl was dead.
And yet, amid all the misery: love and atonement, however imperfect.
This book was a real discovery for me, and the effect on me was akin to that of spending days in a hall of mysterious paintings, taking hours with each image and soaking in their strange radiations.
SURRENDER TO NIGHT, Georg Trakl trans. Will Stone (UK) (US)
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(These are the bones of the talk I gave at Dundee University in June 2009. Didn’t have time to write a full formal paper: I was extemporaneous on the day, moving in and out of these notes, so this isn’t everything I said. This was all written in pencil, in my hideous chickenscratch, in a notebook, a couple of hours before I took the lectern.)
Hello. Forgive me from working from notes. No time to write a full talk in the end. Because I’m a working writer in a deadline business. Which is why I’m here.
I think I’m supposed to be talking about my career in comics, providing some kind of summation to a conference about the relationship between comics and time. To which I’d first offer this, inscribed on a stone plaque embedded in the courtyard wall of the hotel across town I’m staying at:
“God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland.”
That stone was cut in 1870.
120 years later, I’m in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who’s just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his previous discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire eons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops… reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.
He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.
That said, we can now thank Grant for solving the mandate of this conference while in the grip of profound psychotomimetic hubris, and move on.
What I do is the Paper Craft, and there are few better places to talk about it than here in Dundee, where ink has run in the town’s blood since even before 1870, but thick and dark since 1905, when DC Thomson was founded, Britain’s oldest continuous publisher of comics… making this place the storied city of Jam, Jute and Journalism.
I’ve been writing comics since the 1980s — grew up reading Alan Grant (who was in the audience) — and doing it full time for approaching twenty years. I do a lot of other things too — first novel a couple of years ago, journalism, animation, anything that looks like it’ll pay a bill. Because I’m a working writer. But comics were my first love, and I still spend most of my time writing them. I love visual narrative, and comics are the purest form of visual narrative.
I’ve worked in television, and there are a hundred people between you and the audience. I’ve worked in film, and there are a thousand people between you and the audience. In comics, there’s me and an artist, presenting our stories to you without filters or significant hurdles, in a cheap, simple, portable form. Comics are a mature technology. Their control of time — provided you’re not intent on reversing universes (or even if you are) — makes them the best educational tool in the world. Hell, intelligence agencies have used comics to teach people how to dissent and perform sabotage.
When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure… Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media. They should just hand them out to being to stave off Alzheimer’s.
Although I think a headline of “Grant Morrison staves off dementia” might be a little premature.
The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”
And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there’s really no-one to stop you.
© Warren Ellis 2009
Long profile on economist Adam Tooze, who is apparently very big on the Twitter, which it seems he uses A Lot. It doesn’t seem unfair to suggest that, at least in part, Twitter is his deep work.
As opposed to this guy, who couldn’t do good science with his phone on, Tooze appears to synthesise and broadcast on the fly. I’m so far removed from that kind of processing now that receiving two emails back to back is like:
(from experimental cinema tumblr)
In other news, hundreds of people have just been fitted with an artificial pancreas by the NHS. Curiously, my first thought was of a woman I once met at a dinner thrown by Google, who had discovered that her pacemaker could be hacked by bad actors through Bluetooth.
I have to read this again with more coffee inside me, but apparently there’s been a blockchain hack? I mean, if your heart and your mind aren’t safe from the internet, you have to reasonably assume your NFT collection and your pancreas are up for grabs too…
